Charlie

After a cooler and wetter Spring and early Summer than usual here in Palm Springs, it is now very hot and dry (forecast of 119 for this coming weekend). We will be driving to central Texas next week, and I am not looking forward to it.

My best friend was the #1 ranked kid in our high school class, but it was his younger brother who was the only person in our school ever to get a perfect score on the SAT. IMHO, their sister was actually the smartest member of the family, but she never excelled scholastically. When ETS asked me to help revise the SAT in the 1990s, it was one of the most frustrating tasks I've ever had.

One of my college roommates died earlier this year, and though I searched everywhere, I couldn't find any obituary. My alumni magazine usually has notices from the family and tributes from others when an alumnus dies, but there was nothing. I don't know why, but I suspect that his family relations were messy: he had at least two wives and a few children. We didn't have any relationship after our senior year, but he was a likeable guy and had made friends easily at school, so I took it upon myself to write a short note to the magazine, to let classmates know that he had passed, and gave a little general information about his life after college, so that he is at least memorialized somewhere.

The guy in the middle--the only one not looking at the photographer--looks like he is nervously realizing that he is the only one starting to get hard.

I remember going to a drive-in theater with my parents in the 1950s. There was a heavy speaker that one connected to the inside of the car's side window for the audio.

Those Buicks were really heavy.

There is a long article in today's LA Times (based on an AP article) about the shooting rampage in Philadelphia Monday that left 5 people dead and several injured. It begins, "A 40-year-old person killed" the victims. Throughout the article, the perpetrator is referred to as the shooter, the individual, the person, etc., but no reference is ever made to the gender of the suspect, although the assailant's outfit of ski mask and body armor is described. Quotations from observers of the shootings never include any words that would reveal the gender of the shooter, who is in police custody. Perhaps the police are waiting to find out from the person's lawyer what pronouns the person prefers.

Hmmm....not only "Bisexual" but also "by coastal."

I think he was educated at a "humble college," since he doesn't know the difference between discrete/discreet or your/you're.

Yes, at the Wellness Park next to the hospital😒

One time I went to the apartment of a first time hire, and he suggested that we start by me sucking his cock. After a couple of minutes of sucking, I thought I heard light snoring, and looked up to see his mouth was open and his eyes were closed. I stopped, got dressed, and woke him to tell him I was leaving. I didn't offer to pay, and he didn't say anything. Your situation was different. The escort was making an effort, but was unable to perform to your expectations. You behaved like a gentleman, and he responded like one. Under those circumstances, I think I would have done what some others have suggested: I would have offered to pay him something for his time and his attempt to perform, and then let him make the next move.

I had never heard of triamcinolone until my doctor recently prescribed triamcinolone cream for some very nasty spider bites, and within three days they were almost undetectable.

I got genital herpes in my early 20s and suffered occasional outbreaks for years, but I haven't had any outbreak for at least a dozen years. Any idea why?

Although Fortaleza is quite a large city, one hardly ever hears anything about it. Years ago, close friends of mine who had joined the Peace Corps were given an assignment there; even though I had always been a whiz in geography, I had to look it up in an atlas when they told me.

I think I got my first one when I was 55.

When I was in my early 30s, I went to Paris to meet up with my American friend Robert, with whom I intended to travel to Cannes. He didn't know much about the gay scene in Paris, so one night I took him to a bar called Le Bronx. There I met a cute young man who invited me to come back to his place, so I decided to leave Robert at the bar and went home with young Bernard, whose home turned out to be a garret on the top floor of a 17th century building on the Seine with a view to the Ile St. Louis; it was like a scene out of La Boheme, and we had delightful romantic sex. Then I went back to our hotel and went to bed. A few hours later, Robert arrived back from Le Bronx; left alone there, he had discovered the dark back room, where he had engaged in a much less romantic scene. In the course of orgiastic group sex, someone had managed to slip his expensive watch off his arm, and when he happened to turn his back to me, I said, "Robert, the back of your pants look like they have been split with a knife"--apparently someone had fucked him without removing his pants! To the end of his life he would mention that experience to me with a nostalgic sigh for our wild youth.

Baked chicken, that is.

I am trying to figure out what the specific attraction would be of getting a message from a Mormon. Is it a fetish?

It is not just the exercise, it is also the companionship, and the sense of having a purpose in taking care of an animal.

Those tables seem to up my life expectancy only an extra year. Aren't there other variables to be considered as well, such as whether one lives alone, has a dependable support system, etc.?

OK, so I will probably just go on splitting the difference between my parents age at death, and prepare to die at 87. [This particular question has arisen because my spouse keeps asking, "How long do you think I will live?" To which my standard answer is "As long as my patience lasts."]

In other words, any reasonably accurate mathematical analysis would require an enormous number of measurements more sophisticated than simply age at death of one's progenitors.

What I found interesting in my case was the patterns for my father and for my mother seemed to go in opposite directions in relation to their parents' lives, therefore I wondered how one would project the pattern for me, if one assumed that there was a mathematical formula for dealing with the correlation between my likely pattern and their actual patterns. For instance, does one add up my progenitors' ages at death and take an average? Does one look for certain medians? Does one factor in my gender? Etc., etc. Does one simply say, "You have already lived longer than your father and you probably won't live as long as your mother." I have usually figured that I would split the age of death for my parents and expect to die at 87.

No one seems to be using math to make a prediction for me.

My father died of leukemia, the only person I know of from that cause in my family. I don't know how heritable it is, but I have always assumed he got it from the chemicals he worked with in his job for many years. His father died from kidney failure and his mother from tuberculosis. You are correct that my father, who was very healthy and athletic all his life, was a surprising outlier statistically in his family, dying only four months after he was diagnosed at 72. My spouse started SS at 62, because his father--a heavy smoker--died of lung cancer, and my spouse also smoked until he was in his early 40s, so he feared he might also die early. He is now been collecting SS for 26 years.